Peter Flanagan: My girlfriend suspects I’m neurodivergent, but I’m not so sure
MY GIRLFRIEND SUSPECTS I’m neurodivergent, but I’m not so sure. We didn’t have the vocabulary for this stuff when I was growing up. I knew I was a little peculiar, but then so were most of the people I admired; The Undertaker, the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles, my Dad. I liked being a bit different.
I can’t deny that the case she’s been building is increasingly compelling. There are my compulsive behaviours, for starters. I can’t leave the house without triple or quadruple checking that I’ve locked the door, knocked off every switch, and shut the windows. Sometimes I take videos of myself locking the door in case I want to check again later, like the saddest Tik Tok you’ve ever seen.
Then I have my fixation on niche interests. Not trains or women’s feet, thank God. For me it’s always been professional wrestling. When my father told me that it was fake as a child, this only made me more interested. The lowest of all the performance arts, wrestling is the intersection between circus, combat and soap opera. I remained dutifully fascinated long after the age where it was still socially acceptable for boys to watch oiled bodybuilders roll around in their pants.
To be clear, liking wrestling doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re on the spectrum. But being interested in it to the exclusion of........
